It was not always easy to find the old gentleman in his dusty, dingy wilderness; but when you had discovered him in some remote recess he would take pleasure in exhibiting his treasures. He would take down his excellent copy of Eliot's Indian Bible, a book so faithfully made in every respect that I question if, as a mere piece of book-making, it could now be matched in the United States. He lived to see this rarity command in New York the price of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. He would show you forty-one works, in the original editions, of Increase and Cotton Mather, the most recent of which was published in 1735. He possessed a large number of books printed and bound by Benjamin Franklin. He had two hundred volumes of the records of Colonial legislatures. He could show you a newspaper of almost every month—nay, almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America. He had in all nine hundred and fifty bound volumes of newspapers, of which two hundred and forty-five volumes were published before the year 1800. He would show you a collection of more than thirty-nine thousand pamphlets, of which eight thousand were printed before the year 1800. His collection of maps relating to America was truly wonderful. Besides all the early atlases of any note, he had over a thousand detached maps illustrative both of the geography and history of America; for many of them were maps and plans drawn for military purposes. He would show you, perhaps, a pen-drawing of date 1779, by a British officer, upon which was written: "Plan of the rebel works at West Point." He had also several plans by British officers of "the rebel works" around Boston during the revolution.
Besides such things (and he had over three hundred plans and maps of which there was no other copy in existence), he possessed a surprising number of books printed in the infancy of the printer's art; among them specimens representing every year from 1467 onward. He had more than two hundred and fifty books printed before the year 1600, so arranged that a student could trace the progress of the art of printing from the days of Caxton. He had also a vast collection of manuscripts, numbering four hundred and twenty-nine volumes, many of which were of particular interest. The whole number of volumes in the library was 22,529, and the number of pamphlets nearly 40,000.
The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol. Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and unknown.
A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used to say:—
"Men generally get in this world exactly what they want."
"How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I want a million or so myself."
"Ah, boy," the old man replied, "you want a million; but you don't want it enough. What you want at present is pleasure, and you want it so much that you are willing to spend all your surplus force, time, and revenue to get it. If you wanted your million as much as you want pleasure, by and by, when you have a bald head like mine, you would have your million."
Peter Force was a very good illustration of the old merchant's doctrine. He got all these precious things because he wanted them with a sustained passion of desire for half a century. There never was a time when he would not have gladly got up in the middle of the night and walked ten miles, in the face of a northeasterly storm, to get a rare pamphlet of four pages. He was a miser of such things. But, no; that word does not describe him; for one of the greatest pleasures of his life was to communicate his treasures to others; and he communicated to the whole American people the best of his collections in massive volumes of American Archives. He was a miser only in the strength of his desire.
"More than once," he said to Mr. George W. Greene, "did I hesitate between a barrel of flour and a rare book; but the book always got the upper hand."
To the same friend he made a remark which shows that his desire to communicate was quite as strong as his desire to obtain.